Please tell me that OMA and Fujimoto did not win! Giant bridge-like mega projects might look good from a distance but they absolutely suck from an urbanism perspective! The area underneath is almost ALWAYS a dead zone.

Additional visualisations of the Hardenberg proposal appeared on Langhof's website,
showing the dominant skyline impact in this part of the city, landmark-like almost mirroring the Alex Tower/Fernsehturm of the City East:

The Park Inn is actually just 123m tall, making it Berlin's number two.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ghettobird

Why are they not building the tower already?

Because we are talking about Berlin/Germany here. Apart from Frankfurt, where they like to boast a little with their financial power (still less than in similarly wealthy international cities), the rest of the country is very frugal and skyscrapers are seen as unnecessary, wasteful, prententious and so on...
Berlin polititians are actively stalling every new tower project in the city for ages. If there's a new tower proposed it will either not be realized or it will be shortened to a stump or in the best case scenario stalled at least for a decade.

The city of Berlin has unveiled a ten-point plan to make the city a hub of digital technology and culture. The measures include new research groups, better startup financing, and tests of the new 5G mobile standard.

On Monday in Berlin, the city's Mayor, Michael Müller, and Christian Thomsen, the president of the Technical University of Berlin (TUB, pictured at top), presented ten "strategic projects" aimed at making Germany's capital city fit for the onrushing digital future.

"Digitalization has a key role to play in the development of Berlin, whether in terms of 'Smart City' initiatives, Industry 4.0, or the business models of many startups," said Mayor Müller.

The ten initiatives were the outcome of five months' worth of planning - which anyone familiar with the rhythms of governance will recognize as blazingly fast. The Mayor and Council had set up a working group for digitalization at the end of June 2015, and recruited more than 50 experts from politics, academia and business to take part.

One of the most important initiatives is the "Berlin Centre for a Digital Future," which they expect will be funded by the city-linked Einstein Foundation. All the capital's universities and technical colleges are meant to participate in the centre, in an effort to generate a strong city-wide network for digital research and innovation.

A total of 30 new professorships will be funded within the framework of the new Centre, distributed around the various colleges. These will include 25 Junior Professorships and 5 more senior professorships. In addition, prominent experts will be brought to the city as Visiting Fellows.

"In just five months, we've already secured financing for 20 professorships," Thomsen said. "That shows we've hit a nerve in terms of the spirit of the times, and that Berlin is seen as very attractive" as a research hub.

The money for the professorships was raised from business and from other non-academic sources.

Berlin's regional government will also invest additional funds in providing open access to research journals and materials via the Internet. Total spending for the professorships, the Visiting Fellows, and the Open Access program will amount to about 5 million euros annually ($5.4 million).

5G Infrastructure

A fourth element in the City of Berlin's package of ten projects is a commitment to early testing and deployment of 5G mobile digital communications networks.

Fifth-generation or "5G" mobile Internet access technology is still in development, and not expected to be ready for widespread commercial deployment before 2020. The current 4G standard for fast mobile Internet access is called LTE, or "long term evolution." 5G is expected to enable data transfer rates of around 1 Gigabit per second, around ten times as fast as LTE.

5G networks will enable a leap in the scope of mobile digital applications. 5G will allow self-driving cars to find their way around crowded city streets without bumping into anything. Other applications will include health services applications and networked augmented-reality gear.

Berlin's plan is to be the first major city in Europe to initially test new 5G gear, and then the first to roll it out commercially. The city wants to offer itself as a hotspot for cutting-edge technology developers and startup entepreneurs looking for a real-world environment to test applications that require 5G connectivity.

I guess because the article (and all its illustrations, interactive maps, etc) only concerned the city center, as thus defined by someone.

Treptower lies to far out, as will also the "Square" tower and the Estrel tower, the latter of which is set to take over as Berlins tallest when it gets build.

That is...unless beaten on the finish line by the Hardenberg tower, which also lack on the illustration, along with the blackgate tower and a couple of other, more uncertain proposals for the "city center".